Supporting Multiple Representations in Spatio-Temporal databases The MurMur Consortium

Successful information management implies the ability to design accurate representations of the real world of interest to targeted applications. Current systems do not provide representation schemes supporting the diversity of user needs. In the context of interoperability, as in Web access to heterogeneous data sources, they cannot properly integrate the diversity of stored representations. The objective of the MurMur project is to enhance GIS (or DBMS) functionality so that, relying on more flexible representation schemes, users may easily manage information using multiple representations. The added functionality will support multiple coexisting representations of the same real-word phenomena (semantic flexibility), including representations of geographic data at multiple resolutions (cartographic flexibility). This will in particular make possible a semantically meaningful management of multi-scale, integrated, and temporal geo-databases. What is multiple representation and why it is needed Databases are intended to keep an integrated and consistent set of data that provides the information needed to support application requirements from one or several user communities